suddenly in her face and faded again as quickly as it had come.
"Oh, no!" she said with some hauteur, "You--you----"
"Oh, truly!" begged the Young Doctor. "I'm most awfully sorry
for what I did! I can't think what possessed me! I must have gone
quite mad for the moment! Why, really," he flushed, "I don't know
whether you'll believe me or not--and maybe it's something anyway
to be more ashamed of than to brag about,--but truly now," he
floundered, "I haven't kissed a girl before since--since I was
very little!" With a sudden quick jerk of sheer awkwardness he
snatched a card from his pocket and handed it to her. "There!
There's my address!" he cried. "And to-morrow if you'll only send
me the word I'll jump off the bridge or throw myself under a truck,
or make any other sort of reparation whatever that happens to occur
to you. But to-night," he grinned, "I've simply got to get warm!"
And started down the steps.
But before he had quite reached the sidewalk the girl had overtaken
him and placed a detaining hand on his coat sleeve.
"How old is she?" questioned the girl.
"Who?" said the Young Doctor. "Oh, the woman? She's old enough to
be your mother."
"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl.
"Well, she's fifty," affirmed the Young Doctor.
Across the girl's translucent face a dozen conflicting emotions
seemed surging suddenly. "So?" she laughed. "So?" she repeated
experimentally, "If only you had not been so--so _bad_," she sighed.
"Well, about that piano," she ventured with a certain unwonted
shyness. "In a world of so much racket is it not a pity that any
harmonies should lie dumb? Is it--is it a good piano?" she asked
quite abruptly.
"Why, for heaven's sake, how do I know?" demanded the Young Doctor.
"It may be a--a Stradivarius!" he floundered wildly. "But it looks
to me like the--like the devil!"
"If I could only see it," whispered the girl, "I could tell in a
minute of course."
"If you could only see it?" scoffed the Young Doctor. Then,
"Well--well--why not?" he acknowledged a trifle tardily, but
with indisputable common sense.
"I have an aunt here," mused the girl, "who has a rheumatism in
her elbow, I think it is. On Friday afternoon next--if the
rheumatism perhaps should be sufficiently bad?" Flushed with the
anticipatory ardor of a musician she lifted her eyes to his.
"Why, capital!" acquiesced the Young Doctor. For the instant the
whole suggestion struck him as being extraordinarily apt. "Well,
good-by then," he laughed, "until Friday afternoon!" And vanished
into the night.
He was still a long, cold distance from home. But by the time he
had finally reached there his pulses were ringing with fire rather
than with frost. And as soon as he had started a bright roaring
flame in his stove, and concocted for himself a most luscious and
steamsome drink, and driven his frosted toes into the farthest
corners of some moth-eaten old fur slippers, he sat right down
in a great spirit of diablerie to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just what
he thought of her.
"I hope you're satisfied!" he began quite abruptly in a firm and
emphatic black hand writing. "Driven out into the winter streets
by your most charming gift, I have in four short hours walked
eleven miles; supped in a conspicuous restaurant with a perfectly
strange girl and at her expense; been branded publicly for all
time, first as the girl's beau and later as her husband and the
father of certain imaginary children; and have also in due time,
still included in the original four hours, you understand, kissed
said girl 'Good-night' on her own doorstep in the full glare of
a city electric light,--and am now at ten-thirty P. M. of the
aforesaid Monday evening waiting patiently in my room until Friday
afternoon next when, heavily chaperoned by some kind of a relative
with rheumatism, the said Adventure will appear to investigate the
piano--and myself.
"Once again, in the language of my opening sentence, and with all
due respects, I repeat, 'I hope you're satisfied'!"
Then quite contented both in fancy and in fact he settled down to
kill time and cure patients until Friday.
But the intervening days it seemed were not to be bereft entirely
of sensations either confusing or bizarre.
On Wednesday night he heard from Mrs. Tome Gallien. And by
telegram.
"Bungler!" wired Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What in creation have you
done? The adventure intended for you does not arrive till Saturday,
office, four o'clock."
The message happened to be delivered in writing this time, a
flaunting yellow page, and, still clutching it tight by one
twittering corner, the Young Doctor dropped down into the first
chair he could reach, and with his chin dropped low like an old
man's on his breast sat staring for an interminable time into his
glowing fire.
Then quite suddenly at nine o'clock, with the funny new smile
that he seemed to have acquired somewhere recently, he walked over
to his telephone, fumbled a minute with the directory, experimented
at least two minutes with Central's temper, located Miss Solvei
Kjelland, and addressed her in his most formal manner.
"Miss Solvei Kjelland?" he questioned.
"S-o," said the familiar voice at the other end of the wire.
"This is Doctor Kendrue," he growled. "Dr. Sam Kendrue."
"So?" conceded the voice without a vestige of affright.
"It seems, Miss Kjelland," he stammered, "that there has been some
sort of a--of a--well, misunderstanding about Friday afternoon.
It is all a mistake, it seems, about your being The Adventure!
Mrs. Gallien indeed has just telegraphed to that effect. The
'Real Adventure,' it appears, is not due at my office until four
o'clock on Saturday!"
"S-o?" conceded Miss Solvei Kjelland. If she seemed to be
swallowing rather extra hard once or twice the sound was not
sharply discernible certainly from the little fluttering swallow
of the telephone instrument. "So?" she repeated blithely. "Well,
that is all right. The piano keeps! And the Saturday afternoon
is just as good to me as the Friday! And I am all as curious
with joy as you to see what it is, this Adventure that is more
nice than me! Good night!"
"Good--night!" admitted the Young Doctor.
II
That the Young Doctor bought himself a new blue serge suit for
Saturday was no indication whatsoever that he looked forward to
that day with any pleasurable anticipation. Lots of people "doll-up"
for disaster who couldn't even be hired to brush their hair for joy.
Quite frankly if anybody had asked him about it, the Young Doctor
would have rated Mrs. Tome Gallien as a disaster.
If pressed further for justification of such a rating he would
have argued that any rich woman who couldn't sleep was a disaster!
"Oh, it's all well enough for poor people," he would have admitted,
"to put in the long night watches mulling over the weird things
that they'd like to do. But when a person is actually able to leap
up at the first gay crack of dawn and finance the weirdest fancy of
his night!
"Oh, of course," he was honest enough to acknowledge. "Poor Mrs.
Tome Gallien would never again while life lasted be able to 'leap
up' at _any_ hour of the day or night! And she doubtless in her
fifty eccentric years _had_ given extravagantly to no end of people
who had proved themselves the stingiest sort of receivers! And her
sense of humor even in her remotest, happiest youth must have been
of course essentially caustic!
"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so
caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong
passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of
giving people only the things that they didn't want--only the things,
indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as
pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism
and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense--crammed down
into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor
who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the
young doctor!
"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him
outdoors for sheer rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure?
That was her theory, was it? Well it _was_ funny. And it _had_
driven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of
adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland
was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on
Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland,
it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already
arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"
Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line
of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you
made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"
"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and
Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"
Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one
corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that
the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself.
When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof
at least that he sees the joke. Nobody ought to be expected to
smile on both sides till he feels the joke as well as sees it.
Certainly the poor Young Doctor was not feeling very much of
anything at just this time except a sense of impending doom.
But in this sense of impending doom flickered the one ray of
light that at least he knew what his own Adventure was: she was
young, lithe, blonde, why as tall as himself, almost! A trifle
unconventional, perhaps? Yes, even a good bit amazing! But
thoroughly wholesome! And human? Yes that was just it, so
deliciously and indisputably human!
But Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure? A woman like Mrs. Tome Gallien
wouldn't stop at anything! It might be a pair of llamas from
Peru! Or a greasy witchy-gypsy to tell his fortune! Or a homeless
little jet-black pickaninny with a banjo and--consumption! Or--or
an invitation even to lecture on physiology at a girls school!
But whatever it proved to be he might just as well realize now
that it would be something that he hated. Mrs. Tome Gallien in her
present mood would certainly never seek to lull him with a "glad"
as long as she saw any possible chance to rouse him with a "mad"!
"Well, he wouldn't get mad yet, anyway!" he promised himself with
unwonted whimsicality. "And if it _was_ llamas--which perhaps on
the whole would be his preference out of the various possibilities
anticipated--they would at least, judging from the woolly pictures
in the geographies, be free from any possible danger of barking
their shins against the sharper edges of the piano. Whereas a
committee of any size come to request a series of lectures on----"
Thus with one form or another of light mental exercise did he try
to keep his brain clear and his pulse normal for the approaching
Saturday.
But Saturday itself dawned neither clear nor normal. Rain, snow,
slush, wind, had changed the whole outdoor world into a blizzard.
It was one of those days when anything might blow in. But how in
the world would it ever blow out again? With this threat of
eternity added to uncertainty the Young Doctor decided quite
impulsively to dust his desk, and investigate his ice-chest. To
his infinite relief he found at least very little food in the
ice-chest. Whatever happened it could not possibly prove a very
long siege! A half pound of butter, a box of rusks, a can of
coffee, six or seven eggs, divided up among any kind of a committee,
or even between two llamas? At the increasing excitability of his
fancies he determined very suddenly to sober himself with hard
reading.
With this intent, as soon as he had finished his breakfast he
took down from his bookcase a very erudite treatise on "The Bony
Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" and proceeded to devote
himself to it. "Now here was something serious. Thoroughly
serious. Science! Heaven be praised for Science!"
By noon, indeed, he was so absorbed in "The Bony Ankylosis of
the Temporomandibular Joint" that he quite forgot about
luncheon. And at three o'clock he looked down with a glance
of surprise to see that the toes of his boots were dipping
into a tiny rivulet which seemed flowing to him from the farther
side of the room. By craning his neck around the corner of the
piano he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet
sprang essentially from the black ferule of an umbrella, and
that just beyond the dripping black ferule of that umbrella
was the dripping black ferule of another umbrella, and beyond
that, still an other!
Jumping joyously to his feet he made three apologies in one
to the group that loomed up before him.
"Why, I beg your pardon," he began to the wheezy old man who
sat nearest him. "Really I--I--had no idea," he explained
painstakingly to the small freckled boy just beyond. "With all
this wind and everything--and the way the rain rattles against
the window," he stammered to the crape-swathed woman in the
far corner. None of these was presumably Mrs. Tome Gallien's
Adventure, but it was surely adventure enough of itself on the
old oak settle, where almost no one ever sat even on pleasant
days, to behold three patients sitting crowded--and in a blizzard!
"I was so absorbed in my book!" he boasted with sudden nonchalance.
"Oh, that's all right, sir," wheezed the Old Man. "I was just
waitin' for a car. And it looked drier in here than where I was
standin' outdoors."
[Illustration: By craning his neck around the corner of the
piano, he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet
sprang from the black ferule of an umbrella.]
And "Say, Mister, do you pull teeth?" questioned the small
freckled boy.
But the Crape-Swathed Lady was a real patient. Though goodness
knows the Young Doctor would gladly have drawn either the old
man or the small boy in her place. All his life long he had
particularly disapproved of "mourning." It was false, spiritually,
he thought. It was bad, psychologically. Everybody knew of course
that it was unwise hygienically. But worst of anything perhaps
the woman before him now made him think of a damp black cat.
It was perfectly evident, however, that the lady herself cherished
no such unpleasant self-consciousness.
With perfect complacency at his request she came forward to the
light, or at least to such light as the storm-lashed window allowed
and, still swathed as blackly from view as any harem lady, stated
her case.
"I have such a pain--here," she pointed with black-gloved hand
toward her black-veiled face.
Did she also take him for a tooth puller? mused the Young Doctor.
With all haste he sought to settle the matter at once. "If you
will kindly remove your--er--bonnet--is it that you call it?"
he asked.
Compliantly the unpleasant black-gloved hands busied themselves
for a moment with pin or knot until emerging slowly from its
dank black draperies there lifted at last to the Young Doctor's
gasping stare the most exquisitely-featured, dreamy-eyed young
brunette face that he had ever seen outside a Salon catalogue.
"Here! Just here is the pain!" pointed the black-gloved finger to
a spot right in front of the most absurd little ear.
"Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint!" gasped the Young
Doctor just like a swear. Even as scientifically as he touched
the pain-spot he felt his own wrist wobble most unscientifically
with the contact. It was no wonder perhaps that the dark eyes
before him dilated with a vague sort of alarm.
"Is it--is it as bad as that?" faltered his patient.
"Why, it isn't that at all!" hastened the Young Doctor with a
sudden resumption of sagacity. "It's probably just a sort of
rheumatism. What made me cry out so was just a mere funny
coincidence. This particular kind of pain being a subject that
I--that I--if I may say so--have been giving rather special
attention to lately."
"Oh, then I trust that I have come to just the right person,"
smiled the dark eyes with a kindling surface-sweetness that
seemed nevertheless quite frankly bereft of any special inner
enthusiasm.
"We will certainly hope so!" flushed the Young Doctor. "How about
this pain--?" he began quite abruptly.
"It hurts me when I eat," said the girl. Her voice was very
low and soft and drawling. "And when I drink. And when I talk,"
she confided. "But especially when I sing."
"Oh, you sing?" questioned the Young Doctor.
"Yes!" said the girl. For the first time her classic, immobile
little face was quick with a very modern emotion.
"Personally," confessed the Young Doctor, "I should like very
much to try a little experiment on you if you don't mind. It will
help me, even if it hurts you."
"As you wish," acquiesced the girl with the same imperturbable
little smile.
From his precipitous retreat into the other room he returned
after due delay with a plate of rusks and a steaming hot cup
of coffee.
"It's such a horrid day," he said. "And you look so wet and cold,
perhaps a taste of coffee wouldn't come in altogether amiss. But
it's these rusks that I'm really interested in. I want you to
bite down hard on them. And then presently perhaps I will ask you
to sing so that I may watch the--Oh, by the way," he interrupted
himself irrelevantly. "I neglected, I think, to ask your name."
"My name," said the girl, "is Kendrue."
"What?" questioned the Young Doctor. "Why that is my name," he
smiled.
"Yes, I know," murmured the girl. "Coincidences of that sort
are certainly very strange. It was one of the first things my
aunt spoke of when I asked her advice about what physician to go
to. I am a comparative stranger in the city," she added a bit
shiveringly. "But didn't my aunt tell you I was coming?" she
quickened suddenly. "Didn't my aunt, Mrs. Tome Gallien, write
you--or something--that I was coming?"
"Mrs. Tome Gallien?" jumped the Young Doctor. Chaotically through
his senses quickened a dozen new angers, a dozen new resentments.
A girl? So this was Mrs. Tome Gallien's threatened "Adventure,"
was it? Of all the spiteful possibilities in the world, now wasn't
this just like the amiable lady in question to foist another girl
into a situation quite sufficiently embarrassed with "girl" as
it was! "Is--is Mrs. Tome Gallien your--aunt?" he demanded with
such sudden stentorious sternness that even the most bona fide
blood-relation would hardly have acquiesced without pausing an
instant to reconsider the matter.
"Well, not of course, not exactly a real aunt," admitted the girl.
"But I have always called her my aunt. We have always been very
intimate. Or rather perhaps I should say she had always been very,
very kind to me. And now, since my father--" With the unmistakable
air of one who strives suddenly to suppress an almost overwhelming
emotion she pointed irrelevantly to the piano and waved off the
plate of rusks and the cup of coffee which the Young Doctor still
stood proffering. "You must excuse me if I--if I--seem distrait,"
she stammered. "But in addition to the very real annoyance that
this little pain in my jaw is giving me I am--I am so bewildered
about that piano! Where did you get it?" she asked quite bluntly.
"Why it came from Such-and-Such warerooms I believe," admitted the
Young Doctor with as much frankness as he could summon at the moment.
With a little soft sigh the girl reached out and touched the dark,
gleaming woodwork.
"I thought so," she whispered. "And--oh, how you must love it!
It is certainly the most beautiful instrument that I ever saw
in my life! The most melodious, I mean! The most nearly perfect
sounding-board! An utter miracle of tone and flexibility as an
accompanist to the human voice!"
"U--m--mmmm," said the Young Doctor.
"For two months," persisted the girl, "I have been haunting
the warerooms you speak of! For two months I have been moving
heaven and earth in an effort to possess it! But my means being
temporarily tied up," she shivered again ever so slightly, "I was
not able immediately to--" With that odd, inert little smile she
reached out for the plate of rusks and took one as the Young Doctor
had requested. "Yes, here is the pain," she explained conscientiously.
"But only last week," she winced, "on my birthday it was! I had
every reason in the world to believe that Mrs. Tome Gallien was
going to give the piano to me! She has given me so many wonderful
things! But she sent me instead the deed to a duck blind down
somewhere on the South Carolina coast,--shooting, you know? And
dreadful guns! And dogs! And all that! I, who wouldn't even hurt
a sparrow, or scare a kitten!"
With his hands clapped to his head the Young Doctor swung around
suddenly and started for the window.
"Was this a comic opera? A farce? A phantasy of not enough work
and too much worry? Was every mention of Mrs. Tome Gallien's name
to be a _scream_? As long as life lasted? As long as--?" Startled
by a tiny gasp he turned to find his little visitor convulsed with
tears but still struggling bravely to regain her self-possession.
"Oh, please don't think I'm always as--as weak as this," she
pleaded through her sobs. "But with pain and disappointment and
everything happening so all at once. And with my big loss so
recent----"
"How long ago did you lose your father?" asked the Young Doctor,
very gently.
"My father?" stammered the girl. White now as the death she
mourned she lifted her stricken face to his. "Why it wasn't
father I was talking about," she gasped. "It was my husband."
"Your husband?" cried the Young Doctor. Two minutes ago was
_this_ the situation that he had cursed out as a farce, a comic
opera? This poor, stricken, exquisite, heartbroken little widow,
tagged out by Mrs. Tome Gallien as an "Adventure" and foisted
on his attention like some gay new kind of a practical joke? It
was outrageous! he fumed. "Inexcusably brutal!"
"Colorado--is where it happened," he had to bend his head to
hear. "Almost a year and a half ago," strangled the poor little
voice, "and we hadn't been married a year. Lung trouble it was,
something dreadfully acute. Mrs. Tome Gallien did everything.
She's always done everything. It's something about my father I
think. Oh, ages and ages ago they were lovers it seems. But--but
she chose to make a worldier marriage. And later, my father--why
she bought my whole trousseau for me!" suffered the sweet voice
afresh. "Went to Paris herself for it, I mean!"
Across the Young Doctor's memory a single chance sentence came
flashing back "The daughter of a man who once meant something to
me in my youth." So this was the girl? The little "Stingy Receiver"?
Among all Mrs. Tome Gallien's so-called "stingy receivers" the one
unquenchable pang in an otherwise reasonably callous side? Precious
undoubtedly, poignant, eternally significant, yet always and forever
the flesh that was not of her flesh nor the spirit quite of her
spirit. Familiar eyes--perhaps? An alien mouth? A dimple that had
no right, possibly, haunting a lean, loved cheek line? Fire, flame,
ice, ashes? A torch to memory, a scorch to hope! But whose smile
was it, anyway? That maddeningly casual and inconsequent little
"Thank You" smile searing its way apparently with equal impartiality
across chiffon or crape,--a proffered chair, or eagerest promise
of relief from pain? Had Mrs. Tome Gallien's life, by chance, gone
a-wreck on just that smile? And why in Heaven's name, if people
loved each other, did they let anything wreck them? And back of
that--what did people want to love each other for anyway? What good
was it? All this old loving-and-parting-and-marrying-some-one-else
fretting its new path now all over again into chiffon-and-crape!
"Bony-Ankylosis-of-the-Temporomandibular-Joint!" At the very taste
of the phrase his mind jumped out of its reverie and back to the
one real question at hand. "If you please, now!" he implored his
visitor. "Just a little of the coffee! Just a crunch or two of the
rusk!" Urgently as he spoke he began proffering first one and then
the other. "And this crying?" he persisted. "Does this also hurt
you?"